Past Loving

OUTSIDE SHE STOOD in the sun for a while, enjoying its beneficent September warmth. Last night there had been a full moon, and the night air had been cool, a foretaste of the autumn to come. She thought about her wardrobe, bulging with the new autumn clothes the PR girl had almost forcibly made her buy. They were launching their new range of natural perfumes and body products before Christmas; there would be a rash of media interviews to attend. She had to look the part…and there were now so many things to consider. She herself had insisted that she would only wear clothes made in natural fibres, and then had been irritated when Elaine had solemnly pronounced, ‘Very good—yes, that will really underline your commitment to the environment and to the new green mood sweeping the country.’

She had wanted to protest there and then that her decision had nothing to do with fitting into a given mould, but Elaine had already passed on to other issues, complimenting her on her decision not to have her hair permed but to keep it natural and straight.

She had ached to point out that the shockingly expensive hairdresser who cut it once monthly and the even more horrendously expensive lightening procedure which involved a trip to London every month could hardly be described as natural, but what was the point? In actual fact she rather liked the simple elegance of her new hairstyle now that she had had time to grow accustomed to it. It was much more suitable for a woman of thirty than her previous unstyled long hair had been, but she hated the way she sometimes felt that she was being forced into a specific image, just as she disliked the current ‘fashion’ for promoting environment-conscious awareness and products in a way that really only paid lip-service to the ethics that lay behind them.

But then, as Paul had wisely pointed out to her, the more people who bought her products, the more people would become aware of how precious and how vulnerable nature’s resources were, and the profits her business made were even now helping to preserve those resources, to fight off the effect of their destruction.

She smiled wryly to herself as she unlocked her car. Environmentally speaking, she supposed she ought to have owned a bicycle and not a car…She did use lead-free petrol, however, even if Paul, who was in charge of the fleet-purchasing of cars for the company, had stunned her by presenting her with the keys for this bright red convertible model of the same car he had leased for the other company executives.

When she had protested that it was far too vibrant, and far too high-powered for her, he had grinned at her and said, ‘OK, I’ll send it back, shall I?’ and they had both burst out laughing.

‘You’re a rat,’ she had told him affectionately. ‘You knew I wouldn’t be able to resist it.’

‘Well, someone has to bring you down from the lofty heights and remind you occasionally that you are human and subject to the same vices as the rest of us,’ he had told her, and behind his teasing she had realised what he was trying to say to her. She had never deliberately tried to appear holier than thou, and that was the last way she wanted people to perceive her, and so, feeling rather chastened by his comment, she had allowed Elaine to sweep her off to London and equip her with the new wardrobe she would be wearing for the rash of interviews she would be forced to face in October.

As she drove away from Patsy’s, she thought how lucky she was to be able to work in a country environment.

The business had expanded to such an extent now that they had their own purpose-built factory and office complex, on a small industrial site outside their local market town and close to the nearest motorway complex, and it was there that she headed for now.

She had a meeting this afternoon to discuss the packaging for a new make-up range they hoped to bring out in time for Christmas. She glanced at the dashboard clock and realised she had spent rather longer with Patsy than she had intended. There was a short cut she could take, a narrow dusty country lane which would cut a good few miles off her journey, even though, strictly speaking, it was a privately owned road.

She turned off on to it a mile away from Patsy’s house. It had been a hot summer; the grass that grew either side of the lane was just beginning to die back, blackberries glistened on the hedgerows. The thought of her mother’s blackberry and apple crumble made her mouth water, but she wasn’t likely to taste one this autumn. Her parents had only just embarked on a world cruise, something her father had been promising her mother they would do once he had retired. Even though she now had her own home, she missed them. Like her, her mother was a keen gardener, and together they would have spent the autumn months poring over plant catalogues.

Her mind on her garden and the pleasure of the work that still lay ahead of her there, she drove down the lane, the land to either side of her obscured by the overgrown hedges, so overgrown that as she approached a particularly bad bend the branches actually scraped against the sides of her car. It was a blind bend, impossible to see round and the lane was only wide enough for one car, so to be confronted by the imposing black bonnet of a brand new and very large Mercedes saloon coming in the opposite direction made her reach automatically for the brake-pedal, her heart in her mouth, guilt and tension tightening her stomach muscles as she immediately recognised Robert Graham as the driver of the other car.

Guilt because she knew quite well that this lane was the private rear entrance to the Hall, continuing on past it to rejoin the main road on the other side of the village, and tension because…well, because Robert had stopped his car and was getting out.

Why on earth had she ever implied that a man of thirty-odd was a man well past his sexual prime? A tiny shiver of a sensation she did not want to recognise ricocheted down her spine as she sat virtually frozen in her own seat, staring at him as he walked towards her.

CHAPTER TWO

DISTURBINGLY Robert was dressed not as the image projected both by the financial Press and the sleek bulk of his expensive car suggested—in the immaculate formality of a business suit and shirt—but in jeans and a checked shirt worn under a soft leather blouson jacket, the clothes soft and well-worn, lacking the image-conscious stiffness of clothes conspicuously brand new and bought ‘for the country’.

No, these were clothes he was used to wearing, familiar and chosen for comfort. And yet for all the casualness of his clothes there was about him a very strong aura of power and control, emphasised by the impatient, semi-hostile way he was approaching her car, his forehead creased in a frown as he called out curtly to her once he was within earshot.

‘I’m sorry, but you must have missed your way. This is a private lane—’

He stopped speaking abruptly, his frown deepening as he stared into the car and then demanded incredulously, ‘Holly?’

She forced herself to remember that she was thirty and not eighteen. Her face felt as stiff as wood but somehow she managed to get her lips to creak into a facsimile of a polite and distant smile.

‘Hello, Robert—’ she began, but before she could continue he interrupted her, demanding,

‘Were you looking for me?’

Looking for him? Now she was thirty, the spell of his unexpected appearance broken as she stared at him with cool irritation, not unmixed with anger at his arrogance. Did he think she was still a silly little girl of eighteen, needlessly running after a man who no longer wanted her?

‘No, I wasn’t,’ she told him. ‘Actually I didn’t realise you were here. I had heard that you’d bought the Hall, of course, but I’m afraid I was just using your lane to take a short cut back to the main road. Something I’ll have to get used to not doing…’

It gave her a sharp sense of pleasure to be able to deny his assumption that she had been looking for him and even more to know that it was the truth.

‘The Hall’s been empty for so long—’ she started to add, but he cut across her comment, telling her,

‘Well, I intend to have gates placed at either end of the lane, which should deter future trespassers, although in your case you could always have planned your journey so that you didn’t need to take a short cut. As it is, one of us is going to have to reverse.’

Meaning that she was going to have to reverse, Holly suspected as she deliberately refused to make any response to his comment about the gates. The Hall had been empty for so long that she wasn’t the only person using the lane as a short cut, and, while she could understand that any new owner would want to maintain his privacy, she felt that Robert’s comment to her had been double-edged, a means of warning her that the lane wasn’t the only thing that was out of bounds as far as she was concerned.

Was he really so arrogant as to imagine that she still cherished the idealistic and stupid daydreams she had held at eighteen? Or was she simply being over-sensitive, over-reacting because of what Patsy had said earlier and because of the shock of seeing him so unexpectedly, of realising that, no matter how many times she had seen his photograph in the papers, it had not prepared her for the reality of him, for the sheer maleness of him, and for all the ways in which her stupefied senses were being bombarded by their awareness of him?

All right, so he was still one hell of a sensually attractive man, she fumed inwardly, and, all right, so a part of her was dismayingly vulnerable to that sensuality, but it was surely a vulnerability which was being heightened by shock—a vulnerability she would soon have under control?

After all, nothing was as great a deterrent to the headiness of physical excitement and awareness as the dulling mundaneness of proximity.

‘I’d better be the one to reverse,’ she heard Robert saying to her. ‘After all, we’re closer to the house than we are to the main road.’

She focused on him, automatically starting to thank him, but he was already turning away from her.

He reversed the large Mercedes with a smooth dexterity which she envied.

For a birthday present last year, Paul had booked her on to an advanced driving course, and, while she felt she had learned a good deal from it, she had finished it feeling inwardly that she lacked many of the assets needed to make a truly good advanced driver. Her worst fault, she knew, was that she was inclined to daydream while at the wheel…as she had been doing just now.

The lane ran outside the main wall of the Hall and gates from the stable yard opened on to it. For the last few years they had remained closed, rotting slowly away, as the Hall remained empty, but today they stood open, and as Robert reversed through them into the stable yard she found herself slowing down so that she could peer curiously towards the house.

It was a long time since she had last been inside it—an unauthorised visit during a village fête held in its grounds when she had been much younger. Then she had been awed and amazed by the size of the rooms, wondering what on earth one very old lady would want with so many. She must have been eight or nine at the time. Paul, of course, had been the instigator of that piece of naughtiness. Robert had gone with them as well and it had been Robert who had rescued her, when she discovered that her legs were too short to make it over the open windowsill through which they had made their illegal entry into the house.

It had been from the secure haven of his arms that she had faced the irritation of Mrs Powers’ housekeeper, who had demanded to know just what they were up to, and it had been Robert who had apologised and smoothed over her anger. She ought to have realised then that a male with such a powerful ability to refocus female emotions would never be content to marry early and settle for a placid domestic life.

After that incident she had worshipped Robert, but since Paul had bluntly told her that neither he nor Robert wanted her interfering in their games she had docilely restrained herself to worshipping him in silence and solitude.

Suddenly realising the construction which Robert might put on the fact that she was virtually sitting still with her car engine idling, she was just about to drive away when he got out of his own car and came towards her.

An absurd flood of self-consciousness made her duck her head, conscious of the burning heat searing her pale skin. She was blushing—something she had believed she had stopped doing a decade ago. She prayed that the soft swing of her hair would conceal her heightened colour from Robert, quickly starting to change gear as she prepared to drive off, but he had now reached her car and had placed a restraining hand on her own window.

‘I had hoped to see Paul, but I understand he’s away on business…’

‘Yes,’ she agreed tersely.

‘Never mind, I’ll have plenty of time to catch up with him once he gets back. When will he be back, by the way?’

‘I’m not quite sure.’

‘Mm…well, I’m renting a small cottage locally while I oversee the renovation of this place, so I’m going to be around for the foreseeable future.’

He was leaning on the window as he spoke to her. She could smell the leather of his jacket, the soap tang of his skin. His hands were tanned, the nails clean and trimmed, but not manicured. There was a graze across the back of his hand and a small cut on one finger. She wondered how they had got there…perhaps in defending one of the lovely women he always seemed to be photographed with from the attentions of the papa-razzi? She switched her glance from his hand to her own. Hers too bore the odd scratch. She had been attacked by an over-vigorous climbing rose at the weekend, angrily defending its right to spread itself just as far and fast as it chose. The rose had definitely been the victor of that battle, but she had warned it of stiff pruning to come in the autumn if it insisted on its greedy absorption of territory that was not its to appropriate…

In a garden, order had to be imposed if havoc was not to result.

‘I’ll let Paul know that you’re back,’ she told Robert, still unable to look at him properly.

‘He’ll be married by now, I expect?’

‘No, Paul is the proverbial rolling stone who refuses to gather moss.’ In fact her brother had a more off than on and very volatile relationship with a woman friend who was divorced with two small children and who had told him plainly and bluntly that, while she enjoyed going to bed with him, she had no intentions of prejudicing her children’s security by introducing into their lives a man who was only going to play at being there for them.

‘And you…I hear that you’re still single as well.’

His comment jarred, reminding her of so many things she did not wish to remember.

‘These days women don’t need to marry to lead fulfilled lives, and at thirty—’

‘You’re still young enough not to have to worry too much about the ticking away of your biological clock. I know,’ he agreed, suavely interrupting her. He had shifted his position somehow so that she was increasingly aware of him and his effect upon her senses, and now she turned towards him too quickly, her eyes widening as she realised just how close to her he was, as he leaned down towards her, his eyes only inches from hers as she inadvertently looked straight at him.

‘Strange how things worked out…I’d always imagined you’d marry young, have children—’

‘I don’t see why you should be so surprised,’ she interrupted him shakily. ‘After all, you were the one who told me that I’d be a fool to waste my opportunities, to throw away my chances of success by tying myself down with a husband and children.’

He had said that to her, but they both knew that what he had meant was that he would be a fool if he threw away his chances and tied himself down by marrying her. But he had deliberately chosen to make it sound as though he were thinking of her when in reality his motives had been entirely rooted in his own needs and wants. If he had thought about her at all, he would have made sure that she never got the chance to fall in love with him in the first place and he would certainly never have allowed her to believe that that love was returned, but then, as she had discovered over the years, men were adept at making women believe they were acting in their best interest and for the most altruistic of reasons when in fact they were doing almost exactly the opposite.

‘You’ve changed, Holly.’

She smiled mirthlessly at him, and said lightly, ‘I should think I have, although I prefer to think of it as growth rather than change. I must go, Robert. I’ve got a board meeting this afternoon and I’m already late.’

She realised as she said it that it sounded more like the defiant boasting of a frightened child than the cool, reasoned comment of a woman too protected and safe from the kind of vulnerability she had once known to be remotely affected by a chance meeting with the man who had once been the cause of her greatest unhappiness.

The look Robert gave her seemed to reinforce her own thoughts.

‘Oh, I’m sure they’ll wait,’ he said softly, and it wasn’t a kind comment. ‘Odd how different our perceptions are from reality. You’re every inch the sleek, sophisticated, successful businesswoman now. I wonder, has she completely obliterated the girl I once knew?’

His comment stunned her. She had no idea what had motivated it or why he should be so deliberately cruel as to mention that girl. He must know how much anguish he had caused her…how much pain…how much self-revulsion when eventually she had come through the madness of begging and entreating him not to leave her, of pleading tearfully with him to stay…to love her instead of leaving her.

He had changed too…because the Robert she had known would never have made a comment like that. The Robert she had known—the Robert she had thought she had known, she reminded herself as she looked away from him, fiercely stabbing the car into gear, and gritting her teeth. But that Robert had never really existed.

As she started to move away, Robert stepped back from the car, telling her drily, ‘Next time, remember, set out a bit earlier.’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she told him through her gritted teeth. ‘Now that I know you’ve bought this place, wild horses wouldn’t drag me within a mile of it.’

Ten minutes later, when she finally pulled out on to the main road, she was still shaking, still cursing herself for her folly in giving in to her need to make that childish verbal defiance. Why on earth hadn’t she simply remained cool and uncaring, shrugging aside his comment and just driving off without giving in to the need to react to it?

Well, at least she had made her position plain. As far as she was concerned, his presence in the village wasn’t welcome, and she wished he had not chosen to come back. She was glad that it was extremely unlikely that she would have to have any kind of contact with him, although, womanlike, she couldn’t help wondering what on earth a single man could possibly want with such a huge barn of a house.

She was of course late for her board meeting, apologising to the other members when she hurried in.

As they discussed the new packaging, she remembered Patsy’s hint about Gerald not even being on the board. For some time she had been contemplating inviting him to join them as a non-executive director. He was a well-balanced, cautious man who would help to offset Paul’s ebullience, and he was their accountant.

‘I hear Robert Graham has just moved into the area,’ Lawrence Starling commented to her after the board meeting.

Lawrence was their newly appointed sales manager. Paul had head-hunted him from one of the multinationals. Single and two years older than her, he was beginning to develop a semi-proprietorial attitude towards her that Holly was trying to discourage.

‘Yes, I believe so,’ she agreed dismissively.

‘Strange sort of thing for him to do—I mean to move out here…’

‘He grew up here,’ Holly informed him.

‘Oh, I see. Look, Holly, I was wondering: there are one or two aspects of the new packaging I wanted to bring up at the board meeting, but with your being late there really wasn’t time. I know Bob Holmes wanted to get off to play golf, and I didn’t want to delay him. Could we discuss them over dinner tonight?’

‘No, I’m sorry, I already have an engagement,’ Holly told him truthfully. She hadn’t missed the none-too-subtle way Lawrence had let her know that Bob was playing golf, and, while she was forced to agree with Paul that Lawrence’s aggressive marketing tactics were beginning to pay off, she found his incessant need to put others down and his uncurbed ambitious desire both distasteful and wearying. And besides, in a sense what she had said was true, even if her engagement was merely with her garden and her desire to make sure that the new forget-me-not plants were tucked up in their beds just as soon as possible.

‘Tomorrow, then?’ Lawrence pressed her.

Firmly Holly shook her head, telling him, ‘I think you’d better wait and discuss it with Paul when he gets back. You know that he has overall charge of marketing.’

The sullen look Lawrence gave her irritated her, but she didn’t let it show. Why was it that men had this annoying propensity to change from ‘I know best’ father figures to sulky little boys whenever the former bullying manner did not work? Why could so few men accept a woman as their equal and rejoice in her success and her skills? Why must they always feel so threatened and be so antagonistic? Perhaps it was time that someone discovered a way of reprogramming the entire male species.

If they did, one thing was for sure; it would be a woman who would make the discovery and implement it…no man would ever admit that his psyche needed any kind of change.

Reminding herself that she was perhaps being a little unfair and that there were many, many men who were comfortable with and supportive of their female partners’ success in life, she headed for her office.

IT WAS SIX o’clock before she was able to lift her head from her paperwork and think about preparing to go home.

An hour later, as she drove past the entrance to the lane past the Hall, she noticed that two men were working there, putting in the supports for a rough-hewn farm-style gate.

Well, Robert certainly hadn’t wasted much time there, she reflected as she put her foot down on the accelerator and sped past.

She was half a mile further down the road when she heard the all too unwanted sound of a police car siren. When she looked in the mirror and saw the driver flashing his lights at her, she cursed under her breath and pulled in to the side of the road.

She had been speeding, if only marginally, and she of all people ought to have known better. The number of times she had complained to Paul that he drove too fast—And now she was the one to get booked.

The police officer was polite but unrelenting; she wondered what he would have said if she had pleaded in mitigation that it had been the soreness in her heart caused by the memory of an old love-affair that had caused her to put her foot down and break the speed limit. Since he was a man, it was all too probable that he just would not have understood, she told herself as she listened gravely to his caution. Her first driving offence in over ten years of blemishless driving. And it was all Robert’s fault.

She was still glowering and mentally blaming him when she eventually drove off, this time keeping a much stricter eye on her speed.

Rory had gone but the newly turned earth of the flower-beds showed how hard he had been working. The forget-me-nots were small dots of soft grey-green against the darkness of the earth. She lingered in the garden, studying them, telling them not to be overawed by their well-established perennial bedmates, and then paused to console and reassure those same larger plants, coaxingly promising them that the new arrivals were no threat to them, and that the summer extravagance of their pinks, silvers, whites and blues would be all the more spectacular after the sharp colour contrast of the bright spring yellows and blue of the bulbs and forget-me-nots.